Discovery: Proton Field #1

by Laurence Dahners

  Vinn put his palms out toward Myr as if blocking her reaction while turning his head toward Miller and saying, “Obviously, she’s already decided that because I’m young I must be stupid. I think you’d be better off having me work with someone who isn’t so narrow-minded and obstinate.”

  Miller looked up at the ceiling as if praying for patience. Myr recognized she might have insulted Vinn first by talking about his age, but that didn’t assuage her anger. She opened her mouth to fire off a retort, but apparently Miller saw this out of the corner of his eye because he also put a palm out towards Myr to block her response. After a moment, Miller took a deep breath and brought his eyes back down to silently take in his two employees. Vinn started to say something, but Miller halted him too. Finally he said, “You two need to face some reality here.” He turned to focus on Myr, “I see a lot of potential in you. Enough that I’ve kept you on for nearly two years working half-time on a project that has paid off not the tiniest bit. A project that doesn’t look like it’s going to pay off. I want to support you and see you realize your potential, but I think you need to grasp the reality of the fact that I’m running a business. I believe that, despite your unwillingness to share the specifics of your discovery with anyone, you’re going to have to do so. The chance that you’re going to succeed in developing your finding without some outside input has to be getting very small. At this point, I’m ready to insist that if you want to stay with the company you have to sign the agreements I’ve offered you in the past. They’ll protect you by guaranteeing you a significant percentage of the profits if we get it to work and they’ll protect the company’s investment in you in the event that you decide to quit or just abandon working on it.”

  Myr’d been worried for almost a year that Miller might force the agreement down her throat. She’d even begun thinking that she did need help and that she should suggest that path herself, but having it forced on her in front of—and in the form of—this puerile idiot Miller’d just hired rankled in the worst way. She took a breath to speak, but Miller continued before she said anything. “I’m aware that math is not your strong suit, so I’ve been wondering for a while if a better ability to mathematically describe your field’s properties might help you make progress. When I hired Vinn, the first thing I thought he might be able to Miller Tech would be to mathematically describe the phenomena you’ve been working on.”

  Miller paused at this point and Myr again opened her mouth to interject, but Miller had already turned to Vinn. “Vinn, you’ve got to understand that there are a limited number of projects at Miller Tech that might be able to use your rather narrow set of mathematical skills. You also need to remember that I hired you on a trial basis because you have a reputation for being a jerk. You need to get along and to prove yourself useful if you want a job here.”

  Myr opened her mouth again, but the waitress chose that moment to show up with their food. The presence of the waitress didn’t, however, keep Vinn from sighing and producing a long-suffering tone, “Okay, okay. I’ll help her.”

  As the waitress distributed their plates Myr once again reached up to begin massaging her temples.

  The waitress said chirpily, “Can I bring you anything else?”

  Myr asked for a Diet Coke and a couple of aspirin. To her astonishment, Vinn ordered a beer. The waitress also seem surprised, however, when she checked Vinn’s ID she seemed satisfied. Myr thought, I guess he must be older than he looks. Then she continued the thought with irritation, The ugly opposite side of his implication that I look older than I am.

  When the waitress left, Miller carefully steered the conversation to less inflammatory topics. He even found that Myr and Vinn both ran for exercise and enjoyed basketball.

  On the walk back to Miller Tech, Dr. Miller started discussing his vision of how Myr could show Vinn her existing system for generating the suppression field and start getting Vinn’s take on how its effects might be described mathematically.

  Myr felt herself tensing up.

  So far, Myr had managed to keep the secret of how she arranged her coils and the plates they needed to be able to achieve their effects. She’d also hidden the exact nature of the megahertz signals required to energize them. She always built the coils and plates into opaque enclosures as well as continuing to zero the dials and switches on her electronic equipment whenever she was gone. She positioned her equipment so that the electronic controls faced the back of the room, thus keeping them blocked from casual observation.

  Her tension was made worse by the fact that, in a hurry, she’d only switched off the system and locked the door when she’d left for lunch today.

  Fortunately, Vinn kept his mouth shut during the walk back or Myr might have found it impossible to listen to Miller blithely talking about how she’d need to give up her secrets to someone she already loathed.

  When they arrived back at Miller Tech, it became evident that Miller expected Myr to start showing Vinn her technology that afternoon. Though she’d already resigned herself to disclosing the technology in order to keep her job, she reminded Miller that she and he both needed to review and sign the paperwork that’d define the shares that she and Miller Tech would have in any revenue stream. They’d discussed them in the past but never actually got around to signing them.

  Miller briefly grimaced, then nodded and took her to his office where he had Joe print out the latest version of the paperwork he’d had drawn up more than a year ago. Myr took advantage of the fact that Miller and she were a little ways away from Vinn to quietly say, “These papers aren’t all there is to it. I’m certainly not showing anything to Vinn unless he signs a ten year non-disclosure agreement.”

  Miller said, “He’s already signed a generic NDA as a prerequisite to his employment here.”

  Myr shook her head, “I want one specific to the electrostatic effects.”

  “Myr, I’d really like to get moving on this. Besides, you gain trust by giving trust. If you two are going to work together, you need to…”

  Myr interrupted, “I don’t like him. And I gather from what you said earlier that nobody else does either. I’m certainly not going to trust him without an ironclad agreement in place.”

  Miller sighed, “I overstated things back at the restaurant. People don’t hate him, he just gets under some people’s skin.” Miller shrugged, “Partly that’s because he really is a genius and he’s not afraid to rub it in.” Miller gave Myr a look, “Especially when somebody says something about how young he is.”

  Myr narrowed her eyes, “I still want an agreement. Not a piddling one or two year agreement… a ten year one.”

  Miller sighed again, “Yeah, okay. But we’ll need to agree that he gets a share if he makes a major contribution, okay?”

  “His share’ll need to come out of your part of it, not mine.”

  Miller grinned at her obstinacy, “Partly out of mine, partly out of yours. It’ll be worth it if his contribution results in a product we can actually sell.”

  When Myr finally got back to her lab, she unlocked the door while wondering whether there was any way she could tell if someone had been in there in her absence. Even if they didn’t do anything they might have taken pictures of the settings on her apparatus. I guess that wouldn’t be useful if they didn’t actually have the design for the coils and plates, but…

  Huh, the air in here smells funny, like dried…

  She was starting to worry about ozone, but her thoughts trailed off when she realized she hadn’t actually turned off the main power switch like she’d thought when she’d left. She could see that instead of the main power, she’d flipped a switch on the box next to it. A switch which disconnected the signal generator and inserted a chip capable of producing terahertz (submillimeter) frequencies. Frustrated, she flipped off the main power.

  A thump came from the ceiling causing Myr to jerk back and look up. What the hell?! she thought. Though she’d only seen it with her peripheral vision, she had the impression th
at something had shaken the suspended ceiling and that it’d sagged a little.

  Nothing else seemed to happen, so Myr started zeroing all the dials and switches on her apparatus like she wished she’d done before she left to go to lunch. She was weighing her beaker of peroxide when she heard a splat behind her. Looking around, she saw a splatter of water bounce off her power conditioner. Looking up she saw water dripping through the seams between the acoustic tiles of the suspended ceiling.

  Of course, with her luck, it was landing directly on top of the electronics for her electrostatic apparatus.

  Quickly stepping to the wall outlet, Myr jerked out the power plugs. Fortunately almost all of her equipment was mounted on a large plastic rolling cart. She grabbed the cart and quickly pulled it out from under the now nearly continuous drip. Jerking open the door she rolled her cart out into the hall, yelling for help.

  ***֎֎֍֍***

  Joe felt unhappy as he pulled into a slot at the Sonic Drive-In. He genuinely liked Arlan Miller and truly disliked John Smith—the alias he knew Aleks Orlop by. He didn’t believe for a moment that John Smith was the man’s real name since John Smith had to be the most common name in the United States and positively reeked of alias. Joe didn’t want to spy for the man, but he did want his two kids to be able to go to college. Joe’d managed a couple of years of junior-college and some further education online for himself, but he wanted something better for his children. Unfortunately, though John Smith had only wanted to know what Miller Tech was working on at first, as time had progressed, he’d been insisting on more and more detail.

  Joe placed an order with the car-hop, then got out a little Ziploc baggie with the tiny flash drive in it. He wiped it down then, holding it with the Clorox wipe, he wedged the corner of it between the glass and the rubber strip that lined his rolled down window.

  Well before the car-hop returned, somebody stopped beside his door, leaning down to look in the window.

  Smith of course. As Smith’s hand covered the little Ziploc bag, Smith said, “What’cha got for me this time?”

  Joe shrugged, “Some kind of plate that converts gamma rays to electricity. I guess it’s something like a solar cell.”

  Smith frowned, “What good is that?”

  Joe shrugged again, “Damned if I know. I thought gamma rays were something from out in space.” Joe carefully never looked any of this stuff up on his computer. He didn’t want to leave a suspicious trail. “I also finally got a picture of the static suppression set up while it was powered on.”

  As usual, Smith didn’t seem all that happy to be buying information about the static suppression set up, but he didn’t complain. He pulled out a pack of cigarettes and, deftly ripping the plastic off of it without touching the pack itself, dropped the pack into Joe’s hand.

  Smith was gone long before the car-hop returned.

  ***֎֎֍֍***

  As Myr worked on drying and inspecting her equipment, she kept a suspicious eye on the maintenance people who were working up above the lab’s dropped ceiling. When they’d first arrived, they’d taken down the tile next to the leak and found a pile of frosty material on top of it. It almost looked like someone had tossed a couple of big shovels full of snow up there. The custodian had already come by and mopped the floors. He’d offered to dry her equipment as well, but Myr hadn’t trusted him. She had, however, accepted some toweling which she was using to carefully wipe each piece dry herself.

  While wondering whether she should start trying to test some of her equipment or should let it to dry overnight, she looked up to see what the man on the ladder was doing up in her ceiling. He’d handed down several more of the big acoustic ceiling tiles and was peering around in the space above the false ceiling with a flashlight. Now he looked down. Seeing Myr staring up at him, he shrugged, “Sorry ma’am, I ain’t got no idea where all that there snow come from.”

  Irritated, Myr said, “Oh come on. It’s got to be a broken pipe, frost around a refrigerant pipe or some kind of leak from the floor above.”

  He shrugged, “Ain’t no pipes up here. No breaks or openings in the floor structure above. You wanna come up and look for yourself?”

  Myr didn’t roll her eyes, though she wanted to. “Yes I do.”

  She waited until the man had climbed down, then took his flashlight when he offered it. She climbed the ladder, glad she’d worn pants. Once she had her head up above the level of the frame suspending the tiles, she started looking around. The first thing she noticed was that the underside of the floor above appeared completely dry. There was some wiring, but the man was correct, there weren’t any pipes near the wet area. She reached up and touched the bottom of the floor above. Maybe it felt a tiny bit damp? But it isn’t wet. The T-bar carrier beams that held the acoustic tiles were wet, but the hanger wires that suspended the beams were dry. It’d been an hour or so since the incident, so she supposed that even if the vertical hanger wires had been wet, they would have dried by now. She glanced down at the wet acoustic tiles the men had stacked on the floor by the door. She realized it’d be almost impossible for water to run over the tiles and dribble down between them without getting the T-bars wet.

  Having a sudden thought that it might not have been water, Myr leaned over next to one of the T-bars of the hanger frame and sniffed the fluid pooled there. She couldn’t detect any odor and, other than water, she couldn’t think of any odorless clear liquids. Especially ones that froze into something that looked like snow. She supposed there might be such a fluid, but some other fluid posed even more mystery than water. After all she had no better idea how some exotic, frozen, clear liquid could have gotten up in her ceiling instead of the water it appeared to be. Nonetheless, she climbed down to wring out one of the wet towels into a flask. She sealed the flask in case she wanted to analyze the fluid someday.

  Glancing back up to where the maintenance man was once again peering into her ceiling, she had a sudden thought. “Hey, do you see any membranes up there? Like if some idiot decided to play a practical joke on me by putting a bag of snow in my ceiling?” As soon as she said it, she started thinking of problems with the idea. The door’d been locked so the presumed idiot would have had to crawl through the ceiling from another lab, a feat which would have been impossible due to the relatively weak suspension frame that held up the tiles.

  If the man recognized how dumb her bag of snow idea was, he didn’t say anything. He just looked around with his flashlight for a few moments, then said, “I ain’t seein’ nothin’ that looks like pieces from any plastic bags. You wanna come up and look for yourself?”

  Myr shook her head, frustrated, but then had another idea. “Do you see a trail of water back across some of the tiles around the edges? If someone passed a hose or pipe in and blew snow into the ceiling; when they dragged the hose back it might have dribbled some water or snow onto the tiles.”

  “Yes ma’am. I done thought of that and I looked for such a thing already. Ain’t no trails of water around the edges neither. Happy to have you come up and look though, if’n you want?”

  Shaking her head again, Myr said, “No thanks. What are you going to do about the missing tiles?”

  “Them are ruint,” the man said, nodding over towards the wet tiles his assistant had stacked by the door. “We’ll get you some new ones and put ‘em back tomorrow after there’s been plenty of time for things to dry out up here.” He started climbing down the ladder.

  “Can you wait till next week? That way if something weird happens up there again, I can see it.”

  “No problem ma’am,” the man said as he started to collapse the ladder.

  “Um, could you leave the ladder, at least the rest of the day? Maybe I’ll have some other ideas about what might’ve happened and want to climb up there and have another look.”

  “No ma’am. We ain’t s’posed to leave our tools around in case of people might get hurt. You want to climb back up there, you just let us know and we’ll be happy to br
ing the ladder back.”

  Myr nodded, even though she thought the man might just like looking at her butt when she was on the ladder.

  ***֎֎֍֍***

  When Myr came in the next morning she saw her coleus looked sick. She sighed; she’d never had a green thumb and kept having to buy new plants to replace their dead predecessors. She often thought she should just give up on keeping houseplants, especially in the lab. However, she somehow felt guilty if she didn’t have any homey touches. Plants reminded her of her mom who, though she’d never had much money, managed to grow a profusion of vegetation around the house.

  Probably overwatered another one, she thought. Walking over, she stuck a finger into the soil to check it, thinking it’d be soaked. Instead it was so dry her finger couldn’t even penetrate the surface.

  Myr blinked a couple of times in surprise, then poked her finger at the soil in a couple of different locations as she thought, I watered it yesterday morning… didn’t I? Absently she stepped over to a drawer and got out a stainless steel weighing spoon. Using the spoon, she dug down through the hard crust on the surface. The deeper layers were a little softer but still felt really dry when she spooned some into her hand. What the hell?!

  Slowly she turned and looked up at the ceiling.

  Thinking about the snow and water that’d come down.

  Wondering if the reason the air in the room had seemed funny when she’d entered the room yesterday could have been because it’d been as dry as the soil in her plant.

  Then her eyes turned to her apparatus, presumably fully dried out overnight.

  ***֎֎֍֍***

  Despite the fact that her mind kept racing and her eyes repeatedly turned up to the ceiling, Myr finished powering up and carefully testing each of the power conditioners, signal generators, amplifiers, sensors, display units, and other devices that made up her setup. She hooked them all up the same way, even down to the way they were arranged on the rolling cart. She positioned the setup where she thought it’d been before the incident. She weighed and put a beaker of peroxide at the focal point of the coil. She set every switch and dial exactly as it’d been yesterday according to her notes.